'Athair na Tuaithe' - The John Canon Hayes Archive

The archives of the University of Galway Library are home to the archives of Muintir na Tíre (‘People of the Country’). Founded as a rural renewal movement in 1937. Its extensive archive contains an abundance of material relating to social and economic conditions in rural Ireland, Irish rural civil society, the involvement of the Catholic clergy in local community organising, and rural civil society/state relationships over a period spanning more than 80 years. Included within the Muintir na Tíre collection are nine boxes containing the personal archives of its founder, John Martin Canon Hayes (1887-1957).

December 1954 issue of The Landmark, the official magazine of Muintir na Tíre, featuring John Canon Hayes on the cover. (P134/6/2) 

Canon Hayes was born 11 November 1887 in a Land League hut in Murroe, County Limerick; his family having been evicted from the estate of Lord Cloncurry in 1872 for non-payment of rent. In the 22 years his family resided in the hut, seven of Canon Hayes’ nine siblings died. From these impoverished rural circumstances, a desire to improve living conditions in rural Ireland would be instilled in the young future clergyman; the Hayes family would finally return to the estate in 1894 after Canon Hayes’ father testified before the evicted tenants’ commission in Dublin. Hayes would attend Crescent College in Limerick before entering the priesthood. After two years of ecclesiastical college in Thurles, he obtained a spot at the famed Irish College in Paris in 1907 and was ordained in 1913.

Certificate, written in Latin, issued by the Archdiocese of Paris stating that Canon Hayes, then a cleric studying at the Irish College in Paris, is permitted to conduct masses and sacraments on behalf of the Diocese of Kilmore, 10 July 1911. (P134/12/1/4/2/1)

It was not long after Father Hayes’ ordainment (even after his designation as canon in April 1954, he remained ‘Father Hayes’ to his loyal acquaintances) that he was posted to Liverpool, where he served for nine years. By this time, he had already acquired a reputation for his oratory skills, support of the temperance movement, and opposition to sectarianism. Upon his return to Ireland in 1924, Hayes immersed himself in the duals causes of rural Irish development and temperance (he was a steadfast member and organiser for the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart). Appointed to County Tipperary in 1927, he would spend the rest of his life based in the county’s parishes, from where he would conceive of the movement that became Muintir na Tíre.

Page from a lecture on Muintir na Tíre, c. 1938, mentioning the recent founding of a Muintir na Tíre guild in Clonmel, 3 guilds in Cork, and the hope of founding a Munster Provincial Council by the end of the year. (P134/12/1/2/10/8)

In his parochial duties, Canon Hayes was already raising funds for church/community projects and dabbling in rural industrial development schemes. Inspired by the rural cooperatives he saw in continental Europe and by the Catholic Action movement, he sought to organise something similar in Ireland. Muintir na Tíre was initially formed out of a 1931 meeting in Dublin as a standalone society before reconstituting itself in 1937 as an association of parish-based community guilds. By the time of his death, over 400 guilds existed across Ireland working on various local development schemes.

Notes written by Canon Hayes for a radio broadcast he delivered on Muintir na Tíre and vocationalism, c. 1937-1945. (P134/12/1/2/10/65)

Canon Hayes maintained a relentless schedule, constantly on the road across Ireland speaking to Muintir na Tíre guilds, temperance associations, Catholic sodalities, and agricultural, vocational, and business groups, and was a frequent orator on Radio Éireann. His position as leader of Muintir na Tíre and never-ending promoting of rural Irish life, in which he sought to condemn capitalism and communism in equal measure as two sides of a materialist coin while attempting to keep rural Irish from fleeing for the cities or overseas, led to him being courted by leaders of every political stripe. The correspondence in the Canon Hayes archive displays the balance he was forced to keep between keeping the ears of the Ireland’s most powerful political figures and attending to both his rural activist and parochial duties. Letters from Éamon de Valera, James Dillon, and Douglas Hyde are intermixed with pleas from parishioners asking for employment references, financial assistance, aid from being evicted, and simple prayers.

A small sample of Canon Hayes’ lecture notes, which take up four entire archival boxes. Canon Hayes wrote notes for his lectures on every type of paper imaginable, from flowing prose on foolscap to point-form topic notes scrawled on the backs of envelopes. (P134/12/1/2/10/)

Document and mementos pertaining to Canon Hayes’ 1934 trip to Argentina, where he ministered to the Irish diaspora in August, September, and October 1934 at the invitation of the Pallottines and attended the 32nd International Eucharistic Congress in Buenos Aires. At centre, a list of the missions and retreats given by Canon Hayes includes a retreat at San Patricio Church, infamous for being the site where five members of the Pallottine order were massacred in 1976 during the Argentine ‘Dirty War’. (P134/12/1/3/1)

Father Hayes addressing a crowd from the back of a coal lorry, May 1948. (P134/15/027)

Leaflet containing the order of services for a retreat given by Father Hayes and Father J.J. Bergin at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Roman Catholic Church, Liverpool, 14-21 September 1947. Having served the Mount Carmel parish between 1915 and 1924 at the beginning of his priesthood, Canon Hayes retained many connections among the Catholic community and Irish diaspora in the region through the rest of his life. The 1950s would also see Canon Hayes travel to the United States, where his many connections resulted in the establishment of Muintir na Tíre support organisations in Boston, New Jersey, New York, and Los Angeles.(P134/12/1/4/3/8)

Canon Hayes’ name lives on in the neighbourhood of Canon Hayes Park and in the Canon Hayes Sports and Recreation Centre, both in Tipperary Town, and in Canon Hayes court, Fethard.

A Muintir na Tíre Christmas release

The project to arrange and catalogue the Muintir na Tíre archive is nearly complete. After the Christmas break I will be spending the last two weeks finalising the catalogue and writing up reports and a blog or two on the project to arrange and catalogue the Muintir na Tíre archive.

As an early Christmas present into the work of Muintir na Tíre we have released the The Official Handbook/Rural Ireland annual from 1941 to 1955 online. This annual provides information on the guilds, those on the national executive and the work that Muintir na Tíre were involved in during the year. This is available for anyone to read and is available here. Thanks to the collaboration with colleagues in the Digital Publishing and Innovation Team.More journals will be coming on line in the New Year. 

We hope you have enjoyed our blogs on the work that has been done on the Muintir na Tíre archive and some of the topics that have been discovered in the archive. This collection will be available for use for research in 2018 so do keep an eye out for when it will be released. 

Muintir na Tíre involved in Community Alert and Community Enterprise Development

Muintir na Tíre have been involved in many initiatives and projects throughout its history. Some of the projects they have been involved in include rural electrification, building of community halls and centres, EEC Pilot Project for the Training of Trainers and The Tidy Towns competition. Further information on the many projects they have been involved in can be found here.

Some of the files that I have recently catalogued have dealt with two big initiatives that Muintir na Tíre have been involved in. Both of these initiatives involved community development and empowering the local community to work together.

The first initiative is Community Alert which Muintir na Tíre are still involved with today. Muintir na Tíre became involved with Community Crime Prevention back in 1985. The idea of Community Alert was Muintir’s response to a number of vicious attacks on elderly people in 1984 and 1985 in rural Ireland. 

  

Muintir na Tíre worked with An Garda Síochana to establish the community crime prevention programme. Neighbourhood Watch had been introduced in urban areas in 1984 and Community Alert was launched in 1985 for rural areas.

 

Community Alert was organised by local community councils or interested local people with the help of a Muintir na Tíre Development Officer and a Garda. Community Alert road signs were erected in local areas and a local campaign was established.

Funding for Community Alert was provided by government departments including Department of Social, Family and community Affairs, Department of Health and Children and Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.

The files in the collection give us a great understanding of the development of community alert and how Muintir na Tíre were to the forefront of its development. To find out more about the Community Text Alert Scheme run by Muintir na Tíre today visit here.

The second initiative that Muintir na Tíre was involved in was with the Youth Employment Agency. They employed an Enterprise Development Officer to work with community groups to establish community enterprises to create jobs in the local community. 

The beginnings of an initiative to have full time staff involved in community development training began with the EEC Pilot Project in the 1970s but it was not until the mid 1980s that they got to initiate the initiative. Through the support and financial backing of the Youth Employment Agency, which later became FÁS, they were able to employ a fulltime Enterprise Development Officer.

This work was led by Eamon O’Sullivan, the Enterprise Development Officer, and he worked with numerous community groups such as Burgess Community Enterprise Group, Castletownroache Community Enterprise Co-op, Galbally Community Enterprise Group and Tallow Community Enterprise Group.

The files detail the work that Eamon did with each group to investigate and establish various community enterprises. They also detail how the state agencies were working with different groups to improve the unemployment situation that was in Ireland during the 1980s. 

The programme ran until 1988 and while there was some success with industries formed by local Enterprise groups not all groups involved in the programme were a success. The files provide us with great insight into the programme and how Muintir na Tíre worked with government departments. The programme was another example of how Muintir na Tíre was always working with communities to be self-reliant.

There are many more examples of the initiatives that Muintir na Tíre were involved in in the collection and this shows the impact and involvement that they have had on Irish society in their 80 year history. 

Muintir na Tíre's financial and governance records

In my last blog I wrote about the various stages of work that an archivist does in preparing a collection to make it accessible in the reading room. Having completed the arrangement (almost) I have now started describing the collection. These descriptions will provide researchers with sign posts to what is contained in a file or bound volume.

The material I have been cataloguing in the collection so far has been mainly financial records and governance records of Muintir na Tíre. The financial records of Muintir na Tíre contain various ledgers detailing membership, income and expenditure, annual reports and petty cash books. The annual reports of Muintir na Tíre date back as far as 1945. Below is an example of the annual report from 1974. These records provide a great understanding of the financial position of Muintir na Tíre throughout its history.  

 

 

The ledgers dealing with membership provide us with the details of the guilds and community councils who registered as members with Muintir na Tíre. The Guild’s Ledgers contain information on the subscriptions that guilds had for Landmark. Below is an example of this. All this valuable information provides us with evidence of the number of guilds/community councils that were members of Muintir na Tíre down through the years. We can ascertain the history of guilds/community councils for the last 80 years from these records as well.

A constitution has been used as the governing method of Muintir na Tíre since its foundation. The constitution has been amended over the years to reflect the development and different ways of working of Muintir na Tíre. In 1996, Muintir na Tíre became a Company Limited by Guarantee and now has a memorandum of understanding and articles of association. They developed guidelines on setting up a community council and they provided a template for the constitution they required if setting up the council as a company limited by guarantee. Examples of some of the constitutions is provided below.

 

We also get an understanding of the election process in Muintir na Tíre. The Honorary Returning Officer was a busy person organising and managing the election process from the nominations to confirming the names of those elected. We see the variety of individual who were nominated and got involved in the National Council.

 

Finally, we also get an understanding of the decisions made by the National Council of Muintir na Tíre. The minutes of the National Executive committee meetings provide the eveidence of the decisions made by the leadership of Muintir na Tíre down through the years. They also show the many discussions that took place on various issues that faced Muintir na Tíre and the many projects they got involved in.

  

These records provide us with the evidence of how Muintir na Tíre was governed over the last 80 years. The descriptions for these records have been written and while you have to wait until the collection as a whole is catalogued before they are available for consultation, you can start thinking about how you can use this wonderful collection for your research purposes. 

  

The work of an archivist

In the first blog post I wrote I spoke about the various stages of the work that an archivist does in preparing a collection to make it accessible in the reading room. I am now down to the last of the boxes and files in the arrangement phase. The time it can take to arrange an archive can vary depending on the size of the archive and the order in which the material is in the archive. 

During the arrangement phase archivists look to keep and respect the order that the creators arranged their own records. In archival terminology this means that I look at the Muintir na Tíre collection as a fonds. This comes from the term respect des fonds, an archival principle which tells us to acknowledge the source, or provenance, of records when we are arranging them. By maintaining the original order we can learn a lot more about the organisation and the records and how Muintir na Tíre worked.

However, this is not always easy to do especially when you receive a collection has been stored like below and no original order has been kept.

Another aspect that makes it hard to appraise and arrange the collection and follow the archival principles described above is when you get a bundle of loose papers. It requires a lot of patience and skill to arrange the material and put some order on it and make sense of the material in the bundles.

My work as an archivist is to help put order on the archive especially the messier aspects of it and provide sense of the records but also help researchers make sense of it. 

The Muintir na Tíre archive as stated in my first blog was partially organised. This work was done by Tom Fitzgerald. Tom Fitzgerald worked in Muintir na Tíre for over 60 years and was the main administrator and was the creator and keeper of the majority of the files within the archive. Building on this work I will provide further sense of the archive.

That means that each item will have been arranged in a hierarchy that will look something like below:

But what does this actually mean? This means that as I am arranging the Muintir na Tíre archive (fonds) that it will be divided into series and subseries which are groupings of the records based on function or theme or subject. The series or subseries would then have files which includes items within them. 

A description will be provided for at the top level and or the file level of the collection. Each file will also be provided with a reference number. The archive uses archival management software to create our catalogues/finding aids and publish the catalogue on line. To view the catalogue go here.

I hope that this blog has given you a further insight into the work of an archivist as we are progressing through the Muintir na Tíre archive and end one phase and begin another. 

Sociologists in Muintir na Tíre

Muintir na Tíre pioneered and were involved in promoting many new concepts and technologies in its 80 year history. They were involved in rural electrification, group water schemes, community alert and community development. They had prominent Irish sociologists involved in the organisation in the 1940s to the 1990s. Among these were Jeremiah Newman, Bishop of Limerick, Dr Thomas Morris, Archbishop of Cashel and Emly and Tomas Roseingrave.

Within the Muintir na Tíre collection we are lucky to have the papers relating to Muintir na Tíre of Dr Thomas Morris and of Tomas Roseingrave. We do have correspondence from Jeremiah Newman but these are contained in the correspondence of Muintir na Tíre not his own papers.

Dr Thomas Morris was the National Recording Secretary of Muintir na Tíre. He was Vice President of the diocesan seminary, St Patrick’s college in Thurles and became Archbishop of Cashel and Emly in 1960. In the archive we have correspondence that was received by Dr Morris with regard to the work of Muintir na Tíre, his role as editor of Landmark and with regard to his views on sociology, rural Ireland and community development.

He was concerned with the internal organisation and structures of Muintir na Tíre and produced papers on how the secretary should work, the use of filing systems and the structures of guilds. 

In the 1940s and 1950s the Catholic Church were vocal against Communism across Europe. This view was supported by both Canon Hayes and Dr Morris who spoke out against communism in Ireland. Below we have an example from a paper written by Dr Morris on this.

       

He also looked at community development in rural Ireland. One of the papers in the archive is ‘Organisation of Rural Workers’ which looks at the history and structure of the agricultural industry, growth of workers’ associations and the parish organisation in Muintir na Tíre.

The other prominent sociologist involved in Muintir na Tíre was Tomas Roseingrave, who had a Master’s Degree in social science from UCD. He was Director of manpower studies in the Department of Labour. In 1968 he became the second National Director of Muintir na Tíre. He resigned from the post in 1975 but continued on as consultant National Director and was involved until his death in 1993. In 1973 he became a member of the EEC Economic and Social Committee where he was President in the 1981.

Roseingrave was a constant in Muintir na Tíre from 1968 to his death in 1993. His work as National Director included setting the direction of the organisation, developing policy and organising the administration and staff.  He communicated with various organisations and government departments on behalf of Muintir na Tíre and also represented them on various committees and bodies.

He also led a number of Muintir na Tíre projects. As the lead on the E.E.C. Pilot project the Community Development Officers reported to him on their work. The outcome of this was the report Pilot Scheme on Training Programme for Community Development Officers. 

He also wrote many paper on community development. Below is an example of an article he wrote for Community Focus in 1979 

             

and this paper published in 1974. 

In his role on the Economic and Social Committee he became well versed on European issues and was a support of Ireland joining the E.E.C. He was very concerned with community development and the improvement of rural life and decreasing the gap between rich and poor. This can be seen in his address at the Plenary Session of the Economic and Social Committee in December 1981.

Muintir na Tíre have been very lucky to have prominent sociologists involved to help develop the theme of community development down through the years. 

Muintir na Tíre's Community Development Officer - A Common Thread

As mentioned in an earlier post I spoke about getting to be the first to explore an archive. Another perk is getting to see common threads, trends in the work an organisation/person, the issues that come up over and over again and how the organisation/person worked.

In Muintir na Tíre one of the common threads throughout its 80 years in existence is the use of Community Development Officers/Community Alert Development Officers. The role has been used to spread the word and work of Muintir na Tíre in the community. The Development Officers formed guilds, community councils and community alert group with the local community. They provided advice and guidance to these and ensured they were informed of any decisions from headquarters.  

In the archive we can see the role of Organisers in the 1950s is to spread the work and word of Muintir na Tíre in communities and to from guilds. There were approximately six organisers employed by Muintir na Tíre during this time. Each week the Organiser had to submit a report to Headquarters with regard to the weeks work and note if a new guild was formed. Below is a repot from O. Reilly who covered Tipperary, Kilkenny, Kerry, Kildare and Meath. These reports give a great insight into the communities that Muintir na Tíre engaged with and the issues that were facing guilds. 

In the 1970s Community Development Officers were employed in the E.E.C. Pilot Project. Funding for the pilot project came from the European Social Fund. The project was focused on training community development workers in rural community work which led to employment opportunities through local enterprise. The project also focused on developing community councils, identifying community needs, organising local resources, linking of local resources to those available at higher levels and seeking to accommodate the local projects within the plans and programmes devised at statutory, regional and national levels of administration/organisation [Tierney p.158]. The Community Development officers advised on the creation of community councils and the identification of the needs and objectives of rural-urban societies. They operated in defined locations and worked closely with community council and provided them with training and a professional approach. A copy of Conditions of Employment for Community development officers can be seen below. They also provided weekly reports which are also in the archive.

In the 1980s there were two types of employee’s in Muintir na Tíre. One of these was the Community Development officer who continued to focus on community development, supporting community councils and creating new councils. Kevin Hickey was employed by both Headquarters and Cork County Federation and his role and achievements in Cork is described below.

The 1980s also saw the creation of Community Alert in rural Ireland in 1985. To help promote Community Alert, Muintir na Tíre employed and continues to employ Community Alert Development Officers who help establish community alert groups in local communities across Ireland. They work closely with An Garda Síochána. The Community Alert Development Officers also completed weekly work reports. Below is an example of a report from the 1990s from Pat Doyle. 

These reports provide a great insight into the development of community alert and the issues facing communities in rural Ireland.

The role of a community development officer to promote the work and word of Muintir na Tíre has been an effective tool for 80 years. This role is one of many common threads in the archive.